I will try to write as sincerely as possible; I hope, some will not be offended, but we must put certain points on the table. I do not know who is official or not; that does not matter, because if you put official, many believe that they can demand support … Generally I help when I have time in Ask Fedora; I do not earn money for it; maybe I’m a fool; but I like to help …

Points…

IRC. No one, nobody connects those channels … On their IRC channels; none answers. I never received answers on all channels (Since fedora 14) …

Telegram? sure, a good idea; but is a waste of time; I change phone numbers as underpants … And you?

Facebook … closed, admins maintains a ideological bias …

Twitter … It does not exist.

Google + … Soon to die; It was a good option; I think the community was a little active there.

Fedora Discord; it works, but it needs love; I can’t see all 1300 members writing…

Solutions, mostly using fedora, we have projects on github or twitter; A friendly alternative is “gitter”; you can create sub groups, also a world of integrations … All for free; or IBM / Redhat can pay for premium services (they swim in money) …

Perhaps this is the case for you and you find Slack difficult to work with.
But user experience is subjective, not objective – what works well for one
person may not work well for someone else (especially if you consider
people with disabilities and require accessibility features to participate
fully).

User experience is not subjective, intuitive interfaces are always the best
user experience, and don’t get me started on its lack of accessibility
features. I’m not saying that it doesn’t have a good interface for me, I’m
stating the fact that the interface is horrible, and that’s ignoring the fact
that you must use a web browser to use the software.

Unless somebody here has stake in Slack, I don’t think I’m stepping on any
toes, and if I am, I’m happy to introduce those users to alternatives.

As a person who deeply cares for accessibility features, I have to say that this is the biggest case against proprietary software. I modified the source in some obscure programs to make the text bigger, there was not one single program where I could legally achieve the same with proprietary stuff and then also give it to an elderly relative.

Now about the proliferation of messaging channels, there are plenty off possible proprietary and FOSS ones that weren’t mentioned.

If Fedora council decides to centralize things it should definitely be a FOSS platform, have anyone looked at Zulip btw?

I’m optimistic for the proposed separation of channels in two categories:
some for Fedora teams and other for Fedora users.
How to bridge the engagement to both could be an issue though.

But channels for Fedora teams should not be based on proprietary stuff since it would go against the whole ethos of the project and would alienate many contributors.

We’ve already got IRC and mailing lists. I don’t see why yet another platform
would be needed.

I agree, it can be a user interface issue for some people but it’s not a protocol issue. And it’s not like other protocols are problem free either (there’s plenty of critiques about XMPP/jabber online for example).

I think it’s okay to say the Slack user interface is not great for you, but we don’t put down and shame other things that might work very well for others. We can disagree respectfully without stepping on someone else’s toes.

I think you should consider to be inclusive to people with older hardware here, try using Slack on older AMD Sempron machine. It’s not about stepping on someones toes, it feels more like painstakingly skull crushing to me.

Hi all! I am going to close this topic since it is straying off-topic. If you want to have more specific discussion about any of the topics brought up in this thread, please start a new thread in the correct forum category. Thanks!